by Joe Shea
American Reporter Editor-in-Chief
Los Angeles, Calif.
The dogs of war are barking fiercely in their fragile cages tonight,
and it appears they may be break loose any day now. North Korea has
begun production of plutonium, the fine white powder that is deadlier
than anthrax and far easier to distribute - if it has soldiers willing
to go on suicide missions. The linkage between those two events is
imaginary, but it only awaits the imagination of a strategic planner
and logistics expert to bind these and any other threads of horror
into a cohesive plan to hurt the United States. Indeed, we also
suspect that Al Qaeda will soon strike wherever America, Britain and
Spain are vulnerable. We believe the rage that is building against the
United States will not be slaked by war, but by terror that comes here
again, and again, and again.

All of this would be made palatable and easier if we could truly feel
we are right in visiting a storm of death on the soldiers and
civilians of Iraq. But the war we plan is not right, and we cannot
escape that fact.

We are on the verge of a great and historic mistake driven by one man
who has another year left in his term; let us not hope that he thinks
this war will win him re-election. Talk of privatizing Iraq's oil
leads inevitably to renewed concern about the fundamental reasons for
this war.

There is something fundamentally wrong with President George Bush. He
is a sh-t-kicking cowboy, a millionaire oilman who owned a baseball
team and the son of a former President who did exactly what his son is
planning to do, apparently this week or next. He is a Yale graduate
who has trouble pronouncing common words and is given to nonsensical
and ungrammatical statements. He looks great on television and has
personal courage, but has not used his office to make Americans more
free and more prosperous; instead, we have become poorer, more
uncertain and afraid, and more vulnerable to an angry world. There are
rods of iron in him, but it sometimes seems little else is propping
him up. His vice-president, another oilman, is as likely to die
tomorrow from his many health issues as to live out his term.

What is wrong with him? He doesn't have the courage to change his
mind. If President Jacques Chirac went to Iraq and stood at ground
zero in Baghdad as our bombers approached, I doubt our President would
change his mind any more than did the driver of that Israeli bulldozer
who drove over a Washington State girl on Saturday. There is a failure
of compassion and an ingrown political intelligence in his makeup that
is driving him where he should not go.

And this war will not be as easy as he thinks. Saddam has a surprise
waiting for him, or so it seems from the confident, smiling footage we
see on television. But what is history, too, has a surprise for him?

What if warmakers have fallen out of favor with whatever gods there
are? The odds of success in a fight in which one nation is attacking
another that has not first attacked it, and does so against the advice
of most of the civilized world for reasons that are hard to support
with evidence, are long. People who make such wars make mistakes,
because they have something else on their minds.

Will the war help our economy as much as it has wrecked it? The
markets are likely to dive to historic lows - Japan's Nikkei reached a
20-year nadir this Monday morning. Getting to work has become an
expensive proposition in cities like Los Angeles that were slow to
build mass transit. Job losses are rising as housing becomes more
difficult to find at any price. Crooked corporations have devastated
the public's faith in our largest and most powerful financial
institutions, and Congress has only been able to enforce very modest
reforms. The media is consolidating at such a tremendous rate that it
is simultaneously becoming all-powerful and all-irrelevant. Our
precious rights are slipping away from us, usually because we have
allowed them to be taken from others whose faiths or beliefs we
dislke.

I believe God rules this world. As I know Him, our war cannot succeed.
Thus, President Bush has very little time left to avert a tragic error
or learn what our punishment will be. That is the sentiment of an
Irishman who prays St. Patrick will either drive that last snake out
of Iraq or some sense into this President.

Copyright 2003 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.

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